Brother of Sleep: A Novel (18 page)

Nature was made music. Those mysterious No­vember days when the fog from the Rhine Valley sloshed up and down, into the hamlet of Hof, where his home was. The fog freezing in the forests, drawing icy threads from the branches and coating the barks of the pine trees with rime. When sun and moon faced each other–the moon a broken host, the sun a mother's cheek.

The light of the Great Fire was made music. The colors of the church windows in Eschberg, beginning to glow in the east chancel. The bodies of the screaming people, pushing and fighting. The burning property of Nulf Alder. The girl in the smoke-filled room, lying open-eyed under the bedstead, her little mouth biting at her rag doll. The forest animals in the January snow. Elias calling them in incredible sounds, noises, and trills. Their absence from the horizon of burned tree trunks. The deathly laughter of Roman Lamparter, Mostly.…

That nocturnal episode when he had lain in the black grass of the meager mountain pastures was made music: when he had spread his arms and legs wide, as though he had to hold on to this big, round, beautiful world. And he remembered the words he had sung that night: “He who loves does not sleep! He who loves does not sleep!”

And Elsbeth was made music. Elsbeth! The color and the smell of her leaf-yellow hair, her barely notice­
able limp, the laughter in her dark voice, her round eyes, so very lively, her little snub nose, her blue dress with the big check pattern. Elsbeth stepping carefully through the grass so she would not crush a daisy. Stroking a cow's muzzle with her little hands, having conversations with it, secretly throwing apple peel to the pigs.…

While he set these ideas to the most touching music ever heard, he suddenly heard Elsbeth's heartbeat again. And he grew worried that the rhythm might be lost. But the rhythm remained and melted with the rhythm of his own heart. And it happened that Elias loved again.

After he had said everything there was to be said about his life, he brought his music to a close with a gentle seventh chord. Now he wanted to come to the fugue, to the apotheosis of heaven, the dream of a living world.

He had hypnotized the people; they sat motion­
less in their pews. Their eyelids had ceased to move, their breath had grown slower, and the frequency of their heartbeats had become the frequency of his heartbeat. Afterward no one was able to say how long Elias Alder had really played. Not even Peter knew. His eyelids had stopped moving as well, and behind that ignoble brow there was peace.

That strange hypnosis can only be explained by the essence of Elias's music. There had certainly been masters before him who had been able to give genuine musical expression to their emotional and spiritual states. But they had only touched those emotions; the music lover then rose to give them emphasis and still does so today.

But in the language of music there is a phenome­
non little studied until now. The inexhaustible combination of chords is dominated by constellations which, when they ring out, arouse something in the listener that basically has nothing to do with music. Elias had discovered some of these links and chord sequences in his youth, and he had often been able to examine the effect of these sequences in himself and others. We might think of that Easter morning when, for a few moments, he had managed to fill the character of the Eschberg peasants with magnanimity, as manifested in the fact that they tried to outdo one another in courtesy. So when he played music he was able to shake his listeners to the depths of their souls. He needed only to
put the found harmonies in larger organic musical con­
texts, and the audience was in thrall to its effects. Against his will he passed through mortal terror, childlike joy, and sometimes even erotic feelings. To have achieved something like this in music was the merit of Johannes Elias Alder. His music did come from the treasure trove of classical harmony. He had never heard anything but the fat-fingered chorales of his uncle, but over the years, as his soul had been progressively shattered, he achieved a powerful tonal language unlike any master before or after him. It is one of the most regrettable fatalities of western musical history that this man never wrote down his compositions.

When he had presented the fugue theme with the full principal choir, the third of the four pallid professors suddenly cried out. “That's impossible! That is not possible!” he cried, and it took brutel force to put him back in his pew. For the fugue theme was of such gigantic inventiveness and length that the audience imagined something supernatural was happening in the organ loft. The theme consisted of the ground notes of the chorale on which the improvisation had been based, but it had such a dreamy filigree mood that a younger woman on the right-hand gospel side called out, “I can see heaven!” And the theme was apparently endless; it swung from one sequence to another, ever higher and ever more fragrant, until it finally swung into the dominant, in which the second voice was able to start the same thing all over again.

What he had heard of fugue technique from his competitors he now introduced into his own conception with a great lightness of touch. He had learned that the theme reappears in a cyclical fashion and that the key in which it does so is in a quite specific relation to the previous entry, in terms of the keyboard. He countered the earnest choirboy manner of his predecessors with exuberant ornamentation. He wanted to paint an apotheosis of heaven and a Jacob's ladder rising inexorably higher and higher into the paradisal state, where earthly light grows weaker and the glow of perfection ever broader and brighter. Elias Alder's fugue was like a giant mass of water rolling ever faster, growing and swelling to become the eternity of the sea.

Goller, who had steadfastly refused to succumb to the trance, even if it meant he had to keep pinching his forearm, had counted up to eight treatments of the theme in an embroidery of seven freely evolving voices. And Goller cursed his old master, the famous cantor Rheinberger, who had once taught him that a fugue should have no more than five voices or else it assumes too chordal a texture and the individual lines no longer seem transparent. “What an idiot you were, Master Rheinberger!” he growled to himself, and pulled a hair from his handlebar mustache.

When the music attained a complexity beyond comprehension, rolling along in an insurpassable fortis­simo, the end of the fugue seemed near at hand. But Elias was unable to finish it. However, since an extreme fortissimo gradually loses its monumental effect, he tried to intensify the sense of radiant volume by ascending the scale and inventing chords which, even when played piano, gave the impression of an inexplicable forte. When he reached the point of extreme impossibility, he tore the entire fabric apart, as he had done at the beginning, and this produced the shock of a caesura, like a huge black hole into which everything will fall.

The echo of the interrupted chord had not yet faded when out shone the rays of the chorale, “Come, O death, O come, sleep's brother.” And as Elias's hands and feet were no longer capable of introducing the eighth voice, he himself began to sing. And, breast swollen, he imitated an eight-foot organ pipe, weaving the melody into the texture of voices in long note values, while both feet played the chorale in canon and in short note values, and both hands in contrast, and with ineffable artistry, led the theme into the stretto, inverting it at the same time.

For if I can just be near thee

I shall join the Lord above.

And Johannes Elias Alder was jubilant, and his jubilation was the glowing, endless major key that brought that inconceivable, that insane improvisation to a close.

Then there was silence. All that could clearly be heard was the violent snorting of the two lads at the bellows, for Elias had driven them to the brink of exhaustion.

“Goller doesn't use as much air in a year as that one needs in an hour!” one of them moaned afterward.

Elias too sat motionless on his stool. Then with his sleeve he wiped the sweat that was running down his forehead, brushed back his thin hair, and looked upward and outward into the apse, where the figures of the Pietà stood grieving above the choir screen. Only now could it be seen how this improvisation, more than two hours in length, had sapped his physical substance. His face, already thin, was ashen, his eyes were hollow, his cheekbones
stood out, and his lips were dry. He had lost weight.

Then the cry of a man's voice tore through the ghostly silence in the cathedral. “Long live Alder!” cried the voice, and again, “Long live Alder!”

The cry came from the last third of the nave, more or less from the place where Peter was sitting. In any case, the shout was so liberating that a regular tumult suddenly arose. The people started back into con­sciousness; they began bellowing, exulting, and applauding. Row after row they stood, turned their heads toward the organ loft, and gave an ovation to the invisi­ble magician. Hats were thrown, baskets, kerchiefs. We think we even saw a bundle of diapers flying into the air.

“Long live Alder! Long live Alder!” the crowd rejoiced, their throats now reawakened.

The vicar-general shot from his carved choir stall, stumbled deafened to the pulpit, raised his arms to the jubilant people, and tried to calm them down.

“Beloved, praiseworthy people,” he cried unheard. “In the name of God! This is a holy place!”

There arose an even greater tumult, and every­
one–with the exception of the family of Peter Paul Battlog–left their pews, unable now to stand in peace. In desperation, the vicar-general gave the order to open all the portals of the cathedral lest there be a stampede, but no one wanted to leave the cathedral before they had seen this magician with their own eyes.

“Long live Alder! Long live Alder!” The crowd was chanting now, everyone turned toward the organ loft.

Finally the organist came to the balustrade, and the light that shone from below gave his face an even more spectral appearance. Cries of “Ah!” and “Oh!” ran through the general clamor, and women and children could be heard weeping. But jubilation broke out again, and the people's faces beamed in the gleaming major key with which Elias had ended. He himself clutched the balustrade, and no one noticed that he was weeping with happiness and exhaustion. Or was he weeping over the decision he had made while he was playing?

He stepped down to the crowd, which formed a princely guard of honor around him. An upper-class lady pushed a handful of strawberries into the opening of his sweat-drenched linen shirt, his pockets were filled with clinking coins, banknotes were thrust at him. When, like his competitors, he had humbly bowed before the committee of the four pallid pro­fessors, the tumult slowly subsided. The vicar-general was about to lay the book of chorales on its back again, in preparation for the last pupil's ceremony, when the audience cried out with a single voice, “He's the winner! The lyre goes to Elias Alder!”

And they chanted our musician's name for such a long time that the vicar-general, overcome, finally left the pulpit and went to the sacristy with Goller and the professors to discuss what was to be done. Their deliberations did not take long. Despite Goller's efforts to convince these gentlemen that Alder had improvised for too long, that what he had played had been neither the variation on a chorale nor a prelude nor–most importantly, by St. Cecilia!–a fugue according to the old rules but a monstrous symphony, without clearly
distinguishing between the different disciplines, de­
spite the vehemence with which Goller referred to the overall degeneracy of the music, there was nothing to
be done: The eyes of the four pallid professors glowed with idolatrous admiration.

So it was that the Feldberg Organ Festival came to a premature close. The vicar-general pressed the golden lyre on the greasy hair of Elias Alder, who was utterly distracted, and praised the musician as a respectable natural genius. The audience cried and applauded. The vicar-general appealed for level-headedness and, losing patience, finally gave a Latin benediction. Then everyone left.

Goller ran away too, in such a hurry that there was no time to find a lodging for the lads from Eschberg, somewhere they could spend the night for a reasonable amount of money. It was Goller's hope that, having been left alone like this, they would set off homeward the very same night.

Elias Alder's magical performance was the talk of Feldberg for days. Spirits were heated in the cool rooms of the Musical Institute, and lessons were at first abandoned. The conversation constantly returned to the peasant genius. During those days, Goller suffered from painful earaches that prevented him from teaching his improvisation classes. In Werdenberg, a little village in Liechtenstein, three young hotheads announced that they were founding an Elias Alder Association, with the duty of erecting a bronze statue in the musician's honor.

But man is inconstant, and tomorrow he forgets what yesterday he so solemnly vowed. Time did its work, and soon the last distant, glimmering echoes of the celestial concert faded entirely, and the erection of the bronze statue never happened.

We should add that the position of second organist finally went to Peter Paul Battlog. Goller had suc­cessfully influenced the professors, saying that an organist who could not read music would never be able to play the conventional church literature. And in addition, his appointment would be a heavy drain on cathedral funds. The peasant would have to be given lodgings in accordance with his position, and, proud as peasants were, he would certainly demand twice if not three times the usual payment.